The Big Vacation with Girls

After speaking of the HBO series Girls and its brilliant stupidity, I received nothing but remarks about how following that show must be indicative of deep depravity on my part—even though I called the show crap in my title. In my post, I took the show seriously because I think what is not shocking in this show is its depiction of the shallowness of contemporary youthful attempts at finding love. I agree that the show represents a more or less accurate take on of today’s life of love, albeit in a saving wry comedic manner. What I take issue with is the fact that the show cannot do anything imaginative about this situation other than show the boring, stupid lives of its characters in a way which simply reproduces these very same lame conditions.

I am not the one to gainsay the sage commentary that many made on my obvious remarks about the dry humor found in Girls. Apparently I am a hipster conservative who needs to embrace his manliness due to the sin of admitting to watching the truly insipid Sex and the City.

Mea Culpa.

I will not defend the shows Girls and Sex and the City other than to demonstrate my own depravity with a personal reminiscence that could only show the perdition of my liking these shows in the first place.

I was in 8th grade in 1981 and the Sony Walkman had just come out. My parents weren’t as generous as some of my peers’ parents, so I had no Walkman. My peers be-bopped around listening to The Police and The Gogos on cassette tapes—or for the “deeper” types they listened to the 1980 version of The Doors Greatest Hits. Meanwhile I was musically deprived at school. At home I was discovering the Who, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and the Rolling Stones, but at school music was all lame music all the time–e.g., Catholico-Pop songs like “On Eagles’s Wings” (I don’t know the composer).

At any rate, I say this because one day in Catholic school “Religion” class a very nice teacher, Sister Peggy, decided to take us students on a “trip.” Now I don’t know what this sweet young woman was up to, but I wasn’t having anything to do with it. This “trip” was considered appropriate for 12 and 13 year olds in “Religion” class, but I had visions of late night TV and the Roger Corman movie starring Peter Fonda in my head. So I wanted nothing to with this “trip.”

Now compared to math, English, and science, “Religion” class at this Catholic school was a break from rigor, except Sr. Peggy made it too silly for my 12 year old jadedness to even take a break from that.

A friend of mine luckily loaned me his Walkman for class, and instead of taking Sr. Peggy’s “trip” with my classmates—a “trip” with dimmed light, goofy music, stars on the ceiling, and pictures of Jesus projected on the wall—I listened to The Cars’s album Shake It Up . While everyone else took the “trip,” I took my own trip.

Sr. Peggy offered a big “trip,” but I took the “ big vacation .”

I’ve often wondered what the hell Sr. Peggy was up to with her “trips,” but at the time I was glad I was able to go elsewhere than she wanted me to go with a friend’s borrowed Walkman.

Since then, I always hated too cool for school—“I’m down with the kids”—type religious teachers. I can do with youth culture on my own time. I always wanted something else from education and “Religion” class. But not receiving that, I listened to the rock music of the day on my own time in my own ears. I was uneducable in terms of what was considered to be education at the time.

So you should watch Girls, not because it is what conservatives like to watch, but because it is relatively accurate regarding the mores such as they are about youth today (and for that matter, the youth of 30 years ago). Besides, in doing so, you can take your own “trip.”

That said, I’m gonna take Bob Cheeks advice and start watching reruns of the X Files on Sunday nights!